under the willow
by Emporia Nexus
Summary: Look, mother! the dead are coming home. — Ino-centric, post-war vignette.


**title:** under the willow  
**summary:** Look, mother. The dead are coming home. — Ino-centric, post-war vignette.  
**notes:** this is a rewrite of an older piece.  
**notes2:** also, it is the first in a series; its' companions will be _give lilies with full hands_ &amp; _and the roses are wilting._

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The war is over.

Ino wakes up from the Infinite Tsukuyomi to a gold-red sky and the sickening stench of death, and tries valiantly not to gag.

There's dirt and worse under her nails, but it's the horrid smell she'll never be able to wash out of her skin: fresh corpses, rotting corpses, burning corpses; god, _so many corpses_. There's ash and earth and the sickly sweet aroma of death all mingled into one, and she is dry-heaving from the overwhelming smell of it.

She breathes through her mouth – in, out, in, out, in, out, in, out, in.

It doesn't get better, but it becomes bearable, and that is something. A starting point that she can hold on to.

There is an impromptu celebration going on around her: people basking in the relief of a won war, embracing one another and shedding tears of happiness and grief and exhaustion and more, rejoicing over the rim of cups filled with stale water, and all she can think about are the corpses piling high on every square meter of the battlefield.

_I just hope there are enough body bags for everyone,_ she thinks, in passing. _The least respect we can __pay__ them is __individual __bag__s__._

She lays on the ground for hours, as still as the cadavers around her. That's where Shikamaru finds her, weary-eyed and slumping; he's twisted an ankle in all the commotion, but there's not even the shadow of a wince on his face as he walks towards her.

"You should get up," he drawls, quietly. He passes her a bottle of water and a pack of rations before plopping down next to her. "They're setting the camp uphill."

"Alright," she says. A pause. Then, "Thank you."

They sit in silence for a long, long while, and Ino thinks of better, simpler times. Times from before everything went so horribly wrong; before they had made their first kill, before Sasuke left. Before Naruto decided to go after him. Before Sakura's heart was broken. Before Asuma died. _Before_.

Shikamaru's voice is frighteningly small when he whispers, "They're dead, Ino. God. I can't believe it. They're _dead_."

She doesn't need to ask to know who he's talking about.

"Feels like a dream, doesn't it?" she says, not quite rhetorically. "If I ignore the corpses and this awful smell, I could swear this is just the worst nightmare I've ever had. But –"

"– but it isn't," he finishes for her. His eyes are fixated on a point somewhere in the distance, the look in them so vacant she has trouble telling the iris apart from the pupil. She wonders for a moment if that's how dull her eyes have become, too; does she have the see-through eyes of someone haunted? _Probably._

"God. I don't even know what to say. What to _do_. I..."

"Feel lost, yeah. Me too."

_So lost. By God – daddy, where are you? You've left me here all alone. Daddy, oh, daddy…_

Shikamaru wraps his arms around her, gentle. She tucks herself into his side with stinging eyes, and wonders if maybe it will rain.

_That'd be good. It would wash away the smell. The blood._

Things get hazy, after that; the only things she can remember are the warmth of Shikamaru's hands and the tears that refuse to fall. The night is a long blur of aubergine, filled with dreamless sleep that offers little rest. It all leaves her empty-faced and even emptier in heart.

Perhaps it is for the best: morning brings about the collecting of corpses.

Ino closes her eyes, and takes a deep breath, feels ash and death on her tongue, bile at the back.

_The war is over_, she tells herself. _The war is over. We need to go home, now. And so do they._

She swallows, and starts digging along with the rest.

Collecting all the corpses and identifying them takes two whole days – by the end of which there are still a lot of Johns and Janes Doe left, corpses too mangled by explosive blasts or by the ground that swallowed them as it rained down to tell who they belong to. Those remains are just as carefully tucked away into body bags as the rest; Tsunade orders them to be analyzed by the medic-nin and for the results to be compared with data of the shinobi whose status is unknown.

She doesn't back down until all of them have been put a name and a face to, and so, it is only a week later that the Allied Forces are ready to begin the long journey homeward.

The march is, strangely enough, a silent one; a sea of people, of _warriors_, stretches for miles, and yet they make no sound. No cheering, no victory song – not even bouts of crying or the fuss of a fistfight. Nothing. Nothing's heard, not even the heavy footfalls.

A look at the faces around her makes it less curious: these are broken people. Numb people. People that walk just because the brain dictates the legs to move, almost reflexively. People too exhausted, too void to let the shock settle in quite yet.

And who can blame them, really?

Ino certainly cannot. Not when she is very much the same, holding what's left of her father with both hands and desperately trying to pretend it isn't so, if only so she doesn't crumble, doesn't do something stupid. Like taking a knife to her aorta. Or erasing her own memories, just so she doesn't have to feel that hole gaping wide and hungry a little left to her sternum anymore.

From the other end of the bag, Ibiki glances at her like clockwork, subtle out of the corner of his eye. Funny, that; she pegged him as many things, but never as considerate.

He speaks, eventually, when the silence gets too loud and starts to ring of nothing.

"I know it's not the right time to ask," he starts, "but will you join the T&amp;I?" A pause. "After everything settles, I mean."

She belatedly realizes that by everything, he means _everything_ __–__ from the new era of political alliance, the mandatory period of accustoming that comes with it, and the more or less violent protests that are bound to arise here and there against it, to more immediate concerns, like the clan and other unresolved business Inoichi's death has left her with.

_God, the clan._

She will have to be the one to tell them all he's dead.

She will have to look her __mother__ in the eye and tell her he's dead.

The thought makes a clump form on the back of her throat, and Ino swallows thickly, suddenly feeling light-headed and nauseous.

The war is over, but the battle's far from won.

"I don't know," she says, and it's true; she isn't sure she could bear working in a place that would remind her of him at every turn and corner. This hole he's carved into her is of the sort that never heals – the same sort of wound that Asuma had left, only deeper. On the other hand, to work elsewhere would be a waste of her talent and prowess, and it all springs a dilemma she is not well enough to bother dealing with.

Not yet, at the very least.

"Perhaps."

Ibiki nods, thoughtful, and Ino is immensely grateful he has the sensibility to not offer her his "most sincere condolences".

.

.

.

* * *

_fin._


End file.
